Olympic Outsiders

If you can't be inside the Olympic Games, then follow Seattle Times producers, reporters, videographers and Olympic fans as we take you to the streets of Vancouver, B.C., to show you what's happening on the ground and give you a taste of the scene swirling around the 2010 winter games.

On Sunday morning at 10:30 a.m., we received a phone call from a nice Swiss IOC member named Alex informing us that Suna had won the tickets, provided we could get to Vancouver by 3 p.m. to pick them up. After about 15 minutes of panicking and, in retrospect, somewhat randomly running around the house, we got ourselves together and hit the road.

With all the eyes and ears of two nations preparing for the massive gold-medal hockey game, the roads were really quiet. We sailed through the border crossing, parked the car in Richmond and took the nearly-empty Canada Line into town by 2 p.m.

Downtown Vancouver was like a ghost town. Out of high-rise windows, we could hear ambient sounds of cheers and groans as we made our way to pick up the tickets. But when Canada scored the winning goal, the city erupted into a primal scream. From all the buildings, cars and boats on the waterfront around us, there was a resounding roar like the entire city had become one giant sports stadium. And then, people came spilling out onto the streets to celebrate.